A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under the heading “What Happened in Louisville?” doesn’t mention Taylor‘s boyfriend shooting first. Instead, you need to go down several paragraphs to learn that fact. Which leaves the whole article deeply confused: at first you think police just started shooting for no reason, and then later you learn they shot because they were fired upon. Which of course leaves the reader with little understanding of what police actually did wrong. Were they not supposed to shoot back when Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them? Is that the problem?
Obviously nobody expects the police not to shoot back when fired upon. What the police did wrong, instead, is failing to respect black peoples’ second and fourth amendment rights. This happened in Kentucky, where if you barge into someone’s house in the middle of the night you can expect to get shot. Police barging into people’s homes in the middle of the night unannounced is fundamentally incompatible with what the Constitution and Kentucky law gives homeowners the right to do: shoot at intruders in their home. And as such the practice of serving these no-knock warrants is an infringement of that right. It leads to tragic consequences under predictable circumstances where homeowners are just exercising their rights. And of course, it’s doubtful that officers display the same callousness to the possibility of armed homeowners when it comes to policing white neighborhoods. It’s another one in a long pattern of cases where black people are murdered for daring to exercise their second amendment rights.
A group of people breaks into someone's house at midnight with weapons and it's not a story that someone defended themselves, at all. Bringing it up is a distraction - and this entire HN thread is a perfect example of that.
If the guy hadn't shot, or had shot second, or if Taylor hadn't been killed at all, it wouldn't make what they did justifiable. The fact that their absolute negligence led to a situation where a woman died is just what makes this that much more important to focus on.
It is not moved to another section "for a snappier piece" as you put it in another comment. It is simply not important information, it is not relevant, it does not change the judgment, it does not change that the police are responsible for her death.